


Toe the Line

by teacuptaako, tinfigs



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Banter, M/M, gross boys, no slash but yes gay bullshit, semi-ironic foot fetish but then it awakens something, whatever I want AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24723610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacuptaako/pseuds/teacuptaako, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinfigs/pseuds/tinfigs
Summary: Roy thinks, “I have taken our relationship to a place where it will be impossible to backtrack from. This is the most intimate I have ever been with another person. We will never be able to pretend this didn’t happen. What’s that moisture on my lip? Am I drooling? Am I drooling on the toes of the Full Metal Alchemist?”
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 21
Kudos: 117





	Toe the Line

Instead of _I’m going to waste away unless you pay attention to me, embodiment of condescension, manifestation of disaster, principality of garbage nonsense and goblin of my heart, Edward Elric,_ Roy says, “Are you eating trail mix with a spoon?”

Ed flops his head sideways and back to hurl a crouton at Roy’s face. He opens his mouth to snatch it out of the air and Ed’s annoyed face picks up a degree of disgust.

“Fuckin, snapping turtle reflexes… Who ever heard of trail mix with kale in it? It’s leaves. I’m _improving myself_. With the power of Al’s 'fix all the problems in the world’ magic lettuce.”

“Are these gluten free? I’m allergic.”

“You’re not— What the fuck?”

“If there’s gluten in this tiny cracker then you’ve got to induce vomiting.”

“For the last goddamn time, it’s called being celiac, and you’re NOT IT, you just, oh my god, really hate the taste of pumpernickel bread, and if you bring up vomiting one more time today than I’m going to—“

Roy sighs, a small disappointed thing, the sort which he used to employ whenever Havoc did anything to live up to his name. It used to be able to get a room of 30 men to shut up and come to attention immediately, and now it only has the power to get Ed to kick at Roy’s face from where he’s lying on the grungy ground of their kitchenette.

The air conditioning is out. It’s been out all week. And instead of paying Winry to fix it (because she started charging them for home repairs after that time she had to patch up the bedroom wall when Roy tried to install a sex swing and didn’t look for studs first), they’ve just been wearing a lot of light clothing and lying tragically on the floor. Their floor was great for sweltering and angsting upon; but spending time on the floor of the Mustang/Elric household got more controversial amongst hygiene enthusiasts when Roy noticed that Ed had been vacuuming only the visible stretches of ground, and that all the patches under furniture had so much lint and dust and Cheeto crumbs and weird stains that he’s now convinced they’re cohabitating with Stuart Little and all his gross fratboy friends.

At first Roy thought the stains were popsicle drips, because they’ve gone through about 6 a day ever since the AC wheezed tepidly outwards for the last time. But then he started wondering how it got _under_ the couch and then he just. He’s not thinking about it anymore.

To punish Ed for his general sloppiness, Roy scoots closer to him, sprawled tummy-down on the kitchen floor, and starts tickling his flesh foot.

Nothing happens.

“Fuck you,” Ed suggests.

“Too hot,” Roy counters, listless. “I’m delicate. You’re… sweaty.” When the hell did Ed stop being ticklish? He moves to the metal foot, holding the ankle carefully and tickling with his free hand. _Hah_. A little twitch. And a stealthy look reveals Ed’s grip on his dumb little salad fork is now knuckle-white. He gets a firmer grip on the ankle and dusts his fingertips more evenly down the heel, and Ed barks out a surprised laugh.

“Bastard, that’s—“ he cackles as Roy reaches the arch, and then, in typical Elric fashion, is immediately done with the situation, and starts kicking Roy again. “Stop. STOP. No means— hah!”

Roy smugly relents, but moves to a massage instead of letting go. Ed sends a suspicious look over his shoulder but returns to his bunny diet after a few moments. Time passes in silence. The fridge fan whirrs ineffectually as it tries to keep the freezer cold, even though Ed opened it and jammed the drawer with one of his alchemy textbooks so that the frozen air would waft past where the two of them are camping out on the floor. It worked for the first couple minutes but now all it’s doing is dripping mysterious juice onto the floor. The exhausted synapses in the back of Roy’s brain tries to connect this phenomenon to the stains under the couch.

“I haven’t talked about vomiting a lot today,” he remembers, circling back, “I just wanted to make sure that takeout hadn’t gone off.”

“Sure. But what you said was ‘Darling, Baby, if I eat your leftovers am I going to then unhinge my jaw and spew puke like an exploding horizontal waterfall of upchuck and stomach bile? Or is it safe?’ Which, I think we can agree, was a dumb thing for you to have said.”

Roy closes his eyes serenely and twists hard on Ed’s pinky toe. “I don’t remember phrasing it that way.”

“Yeah, well, your memory is even worse than your improv threatening imagery.” A beat. Roy can see the flex on Ed’s hands as he visibly tries to talk himself into taking another bite of salad. “This lettuce shit is so vile. I _wish_ it was trail mix. Are we out of trail mix?”

The idea that Ed ate all the trail mix in the house rather than cook something or spend money on a dinner out and then didn’t add a new container of trail mix to the shopping list and then got annoyed when Roy asked him about it and then STILL didn’t add it to the shopping list and then resultingly got into a Cold War where both he and Roy really wanted to eat trail mix but didn’t want to be the first to break and buy some and then months passed and Roy still thought about trail mix almost every day but he can’t get any for pride reasons and _then Ed apparently forgot about the whole thing_ doesn’t so much as infuriate Roy as it makes him blind with rage for about three milliseconds, and then bone-soft with fond geniality.

“We are out of trail mix, Ed,” he answers, after way too long a pause. And then, because vengeance, he lifts Ed’s metal foot to his mouth and bites his big toe.

And Holy Shit. It’s Cold.

The toe is just the right size to sit on the tip of his tongue. The metal is like a cool balm over his sweaty face. It stays cold even after he’s touched it, and instinctively he chases that high: opens his mouth a little more, gets the next toe in too.

He licks it. They’ve been wasting so much money on popsicles when they could’ve just had Ed taking icebaths all along. This is fantastic. His tongue sticks a bit to the flat side, so he rolls the toe into the side of his cheek instead. Magic.

Roy becomes aware of a silence. It’s not as much threatening as it is… tense.

Ed is watching him, chin twisted all the way around to rest on his shoulder, something complex and furrowed in his brow.

Roy thinks, “ _I have taken our relationship to a place where it will be impossible to backtrack from. This is the most intimate I have ever been with another person. We will never be able to pretend this didn’t happen. What’s that moisture on my lip? Am I drooling? Am I drooling on the toes of the Full Metal Alchemist?_ ”

Ed says,“You ate the fucking trail mix?”

Because it occurs to him that once Roy takes Ed’s feet out of his mouth they will absolutely never go back in again, instead of responding verbally, Roy raises his eyebrows in his best ‘well, I certainly hope that isn’t your final conclusion’ sort of way. Ed scowls darkly and twitches his leg just so that Roy chokes a little bit, and Ed’s face splits open into a ‘why are you like this and why did you happen to me,’ Elric smile. It’s a look that Roy only sees after he’s done something that he’s going to have to live down in stories over and over again. Usually he doesn’t think that he deserves it. But this time? Fair. Fair enough.

He pulls at Ed’s ankle to get the foot out of his mouth. It’s warm again, and unpleasantly damp, so he starts licking at the smallest one, where it’s still frozen.

“I knew you only wanted me for my body,” Ed accuses. “What am I to you? A corn on the cob? I’m going to tell Al about this because I happen to know for a fact that he warned you about this scenario in one of the several dozen shovel talks he’s given you over the years.”

Roy sucks once, hard, to get this absolute disgrace of a few minutes out of his system forever, and drops Ed’s feet to the floor. “Okay. Tell Al that you rode your skateboard into the air conditioning unit that he bought us for Killing The Fürher-Versery and that to keep myself healthy I had to resort to sucking your toes.”

Ed starts laughing, rolls over onto his back, pelts Roy with damp lettuce. His cheeks are flushed red, not from heat (Ed goes pale and corpse-like when he’s uncomfortable), and he pokes his tongue out between his lips in the way he does when he’s feeling good.

“Bastard. You don’t know where those have been.”

“I can guess,” Roy smiles, and spreads out on the ground next to them. They lay there, staring at the grout on the ceiling and the burned-out lightbulb that still needs replacing.

“You don’t know my beauty routine either. What if I dip my toes in motor oil every morning? Then what, stupid? If you expect me to alchemise it out of your body than guess again, because I’d rather let you die than go and relearn anything about biochemistry.”

“The poison control number is on the fridge. I looked it up after our takeout conversation.” Even without looking, Roy knows the punch is coming. He absorbs it and lets it shake loose a laugh, rolls to his side and slaps vaguely back at the writhing angry ball of Elric. They loose steam quickly, and besides, Ed ends up cracking his head on the freezer door.

It’s still again. Life is like that nowadays: fast and urgent, lazy and hot, bursts of feeling, and stain covered. Messy. Strange. With Ed. And very good.

Ed says, after awhile, “we’re going to try that again someday and we’re not going to talk about it.”

And Roy says, “Only if you pick up more trail mix.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is set within the MAU (meat art universe).
> 
> dragging havoc for no reason and at the drop of a hat? in my toe sucking fanfic? it's more likely than you think.


End file.
